Author, Poet, Dancer, Healer

Ginseng Tango

Ginseng Tango chronicles my move to the Korean peninsula to teach English, American culture, and dance while going through a divorce. It follows my involvement with tango, Buddhism, shamanism, and acupuncture while dodging death threats from a jealous woman. The memoir reveals my joy and unease as a foreigner while navigating struggles between ancient and modern practices, western and eastern ideals, feminism and Confucianism as North Korea launches missiles.

“… a brilliantly-written narrative that is more than worthy of your time, attention and thought.”

—Burgess Needle

“The sounds, smells, and tastes of South Korea serve as the backdrop as she navigates the intricate topography of her own spiritual and emotional landscape, and like a skilled tango partner, her perfectly-paced prose pulls you close, then sweeps you off your feet and into the moment.”

Her Body Listening

Her Body Listening, my newest collection, is a poetic reflection on my final year in training as a Healing Touch practitioner.

“How to write the body? Pallant enters the ever changing mutability of the body with language that kinesthetically charges sentences, bleeds words into juxtapositions, and channels passions as vehicles to transcend and heal.”

—Kristin Prevallet

“In this new poetry collection, Cheryl Pallant plays both with the harsh discordance of language and its soothing homophones ‘line by line, sharps by flats, horn by heard.’ Ornette Coleman’s free jazz comes to mind.”

—Brigitte Byrd

“Her Body Listening shows us how reading itself can be a form of therapy, can remind us to breathe and to release the holds that hinder.”

Writing From The Body

A benefit of working with an Indie Press such as Big Table Publishing is contributing to the design of the book cover. For Ginseng Tango, my travel memoir on South Korea due out in October, I chose the amazing book designer Robert Smith who created previous covers for...

On October 25, 1914, banker John Allyn Smith and schoolteacher Martha Little welcomed their first of two sons, John Allyn Smith Jr.—now known to the world as John Berryman. Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, a town of roughly 17,000 people, about the same size then as it is today, best known for housing prison inmates and a munitions plant…

I moved off campus my junior year at Long Island University into a second-floor room of a home in the cheerful village of Sea Cliff, one square mile of artists, Victorian architecture, and a small cliff park overlooking Hempstead Bay. My space, with an adjacent half room, boasted two walls of picture windows with ample light and openness to support studying, reflecting, and launching myself into independence.